


Grief

by starzinoureyes



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Jared Kleinman Is Bad at Feelings, Jared POV, M/M, Miscommunication, Not A Fix-It, Not AU, Sad, Secret Relationship, actually makes it worse tbh, i cannot emphasize enough there is nothing happy here, im sorry for this, so evan isnt really portrayed very nicely but i promise i love him, this is just stream of consciousness that makes no sense but thats kinda the point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:56:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23484928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starzinoureyes/pseuds/starzinoureyes
Summary: Jared's internal monologue through the events of the show
Relationships: Jared Kleinman/Connor Murphy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	Grief

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this about two months ago while crying on the plane ride back from seeing the deh tour. i wasn't going to post this because its really just a mess of pain but my other projects are taking longer than expected and i havent posted in awhile so here we are. i apologize in advance. semi-edited, but this is really just word vomit.

I don’t know what I had expected, honestly.

I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, which wasn’t that unusual. We’d get busy, he’d get into one of his moods, one of us would randomly get upset at the other for no reason, and pretty soon a week or two would go by before he’d show up at my bedroom window with a blank expression and I’d pull him inside and we’d fuck as quietly as we could with my parents just down the hall. I don’t think they ever knew. They never said anything, at least. No one knew.

Did that make it easier or harder?

We weren’t boyfriends. Boyfriends implied dating, and dating implied doing more than sneaking around to have sex at regular intervals. And we weren’t friends with benefits, because that implied that we were friends. Friends seemed...like too much, but also not enough. We never put a label on it, never saw the need. I almost wish we had. That way I could at least know what I’d lost.

I had to find out from Evan, of all people. No one would have known to contact me. No one knew we even knew each other. Not his parents, not the school, not even Evan. Hell, if it hadn’t have been for Evan’s weird therapy/sex letter I probably would’ve found out on fucking twitter or something. Or when the school had sent out the email. At least this way someone told me. At least I wasn’t the absolute last to know.

Grief is weird. On some dark level, I had known this was a possibility. He’d told me he’d thought about it before, that he still thought about it. I never knew how to react when he said shit like that. Usually I’d kiss him and we’d get sidetracked. I told myself I could communicate better with my body than I could with my words. Maybe that was just a rationalization for avoiding serious conversations. Maybe if I’d really been there, actually told him I was there, maybe that would’ve made a difference. Or maybe I’d have just let myself get too emotionally attached to a boy who was doomed to leave me anyways.

I can’t cry. Not only is Evan on the other side of the screen freaking out to me about a problem he’d caused for himself—a problem which seems so minuscule compared to the gaping hole that’s suddenly appeared in my chest—but it’s like my emotions have abandoned me. I’m numb. Nothing really feels different, but knowing that my life has been so hugely altered is a weird disconnect, and rather than process it my brain shuts down. Pretty typical, actually.

Evan’s a good distraction and I’m very good at being an asshole, so it’s easy to pretend that life just goes on. Because it does, really. He hadn’t been some permanent fixture in my daily life. I wasn’t seeing the ghost of him in all our favorite places. We didn’t even have any favorite places. He was just a guy, a guy I’d really only known a few months, a guy I’d call when I needed and wouldn’t have to worry about strings or feelings. A guy I could vent to on hard days who wouldn’t judge me or ask intrusive questions, who would hold me if I started to cry and then never mention it again. A guy who let me see pieces of himself that I know he never shared with anyone else.

But I still hadn’t known, so maybe he didn’t share as much with me as I’d thought.

Sadness is too hard to deal with, so I choose anger and indifference. There’s so much anger there, at everyone. At myself. At anyone who had missed the signs, who could’ve saved him, or helped him. At myself. At Evan, for turning this fucked up situation into a way to get close to Zoe Murphy and fix his own fucked up life. He doesn’t know him at all. As far as i know, their only interaction had been that day in the computer lab when everything went wrong, and that same morning when I had called him a freak and ran away.

That was the last time I saw him. That would forever be the last thing I said to him. He knew I didn’t mean it like that, just like I knew he wouldn’t have actually hurt me, but what if. What if that had tipped him over the edge. What if I had stayed, waited for Evan to leave, given him a smile? Left one more note in his locker reminding him that I cared. I tried to do that sometimes. Remind him that I cared. I tried not to make it a big deal, but I needed him to know. Whatever we were, there was an us. We weren’t alone when we had an us. I tried to remind him of that. Maybe it wasn’t enough. Anger at myself.

Evan isn’t too off-base with the secret email account. He had one, actually. I do too. His parents read his emails and texts, and the last thing we wanted was for either of our parents to find out. Not that they’d have been against it, but because we knew they wouldn’t get it. They’d want to make it into a bigger deal than it was, ruin our little bit of peace. But the things Evan wants to write in the emails...couldn’t be further from the truth.

He hadn’t been getting better. He’d been trying, sometimes, but for the most part he was just trying to get through the day. Giving up smoking had never once crossed his mind. Or mine, honestly. We’d go to the park sometimes, late at night. A few times. When he had some especially good weed and wanted to share it with someone. We’d go and light up and get each other off under the moonlight. That was about as close to romance as we ever got. 

Sure he  _ wanted _ to get better, but it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you’ve been stuck in that same tunnel for seventeen years and the light never seems to come any closer. In a cynical way, I’m impressed he made it as long as he did. He always said he’d expected to be dead a long time ago, so I guess that was something. 

He’d hate this, I know. All the attention on him. Especially attention out of sympathy. None of these assholes gave a shit when he was alive, and they had no business pretending to do so now. Even Evan. He and Evan weren’t friends. Evan didn’t know him. Evan’s the easiest person to be angry at. And honestly, he deserves it. If he had any idea...fuck. Not like I’d ever tell him any of it. What kind of shitty human would I be outing someone after they died? Even I’m not that selfish. And I’m not looking for sympathy, either. Or any kind of attention. I lay low, that's what I do. Deflect. No matter how loud I yell, somehow I still manage to stay in the background. It’s impressive, honestly.

He saw me. In his own way, he saw me. That had been enough. It’s still enough. At least, it’s as good as I’ll get.

I’m not so dramatic to claim that he was The One. He probably wasn’t. Even if we kept doing whatever we had been doing through the end of high school, we’d go our separate ways and fizzle out after graduation, and that would’ve been fine. We’d have moved on. There’s every chance that the net impact on my life will be absolutely zero. 

But I’m a thinker. I think a lot, especially when there’s no one to talk to. My cat doesn’t count, she can’t answer back, so it’s just like thinking anyways. So I think. I think about what I could’ve done differently. I think of the alternate timelines where we’re better at this than we actually were, where people know, where he held on just a little bit longer, where we made it past high school and went away to college and got a little apartment together to be our own space, where we could tell each other exactly how we felt, where we allowed ourselves to feel those things, where I’m the one who gets to grieve with his family.

The last thought surprises me, though I know it shouldn’t. Of course there’s a part of me that’s jealous. I’m angry at Evan, for getting things he doesn’t deserve. For spreading lies about this person that I knew so intimately and benefitting from it.  _ Let me tell you about him,  _ I want to scream.  _ You have him all wrong. There were so many good things, let me tell you about the good things. _ But I can’t, of course. So I just remember them myself.

He was an asshole. He’d be the first to admit it and I’d probably be the second. But I’m an asshole too. We understood that. We looked past that. Once you looked past that, he was kind of the greatest guy ever. 

His sense of humor was even darker than mine. I never saw it coming, that he could be funny, which sounds like such a disgusting teenage cliche, but we laughed a lot. When we got high, obviously, but sober too. I go through life laughing at everything. It’s how I cope, I guess. But with him I didn’t laugh to cope, or laugh to keep from exposing my true feelings. I laughed because I was happy. If nothing else, being around him made me really fucking happy. I never saw him laugh at school, or around his family. But I made him laugh. That’s the first thing that really makes me sad, I realize. That I won’t get to do that again. 

I turn that into anger, too, when I see Evan smiling happily at Zoe. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that he gets to have that. That he gets to take my one real thing and turn it into something for himself. She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t know what I know. I could tell her. I could tell everyone. Part of me wants to. The ultimate revenge. Take everything from him. But it’s not Evan’s fault, not really. He doesn’t know. And that’s because I don’t want him to know. I have no right to be angry. 

Besides, revenge won’t bring him back. It won’t change anything. It’ll just give me more things to feel guilty about, and I deal with enough guilt already.

I’ve lost Evan completely, by now. I know I never deserved him to begin with, but a part of me had hoped that maybe this whole thing could bring us closer. I had grown accustomed to not being alone, and maybe I was just looking for a replacement. Which probably makes me a terrible person, but that’s not news to me anymore. Evan had needed help, and I’d needed...someone. The shit I had to put myself through to help him keep up the charade, the lies I had to tell, the feelings I’d had to suppress. I guess I’d hoped he’d realize. But that’s not his fault either. From his perspective, I’m the same asshole who’s been giving him a hard time since we started high school, and I deserve that. 

So I’m alone again. I miss him. I hate that I miss him. But I do. A couple of times, I’ve thought about sending him an email. For closure, or something. But what’s the point? No one would see it, and it would just make me feel that little bit more pathetic. I’ve always been good at keeping my thoughts to myself, no reason to change that now.

Thoughts, thoughts, so many thoughts. Thoughts of long hair and dark eyes and gentle hands and strong arms and a smile that almost made me want to abandon the easy arrangement that we had and promise him the world. I could use a hug right about now. I’d never admit it to anyone, but I can feel myself teetering on the edge. Whenever that happened I’d just ask him to come over and he’d take me apart piece by piece until I couldn’t feel anything else, and then he’d hold me until he had to sneak back out the next morning. He’d never do that again, either.

I don’t have anyone to turn to. I’m just like the rest of the school, here. Just another faceless student who lost a classmate they had hardly even noticed before. No one knew I noticed him. No one knew I cared. Everyone’s still talking about how brave Evan is, but I’m the one who’s actually falling apart. No one knows. I don’t want anyone to know. But I need someone to know. Actually, I just need him. Other people knowing wouldn’t change anything. What would they do, besides send me the same sad smiles they’re giving Evan, try to sit with me at lunch, get me to talk about him. I don’t have the words, I really don’t. None of them would get it either.

It’s a process. It takes weeks for me to feel sad. Weeks after that to miss him. And weeks after that to finally admit to myself that maybe we had never been as casual as we’d tried to convince ourselves. I wonder if he’d thought so too. I wonder if we’d have ever figured it out. If I’d ever have said anything to him.

I loved him. I still love him, actually. That gaping hole in my chest isn’t shock, because it’s been months and it hasn’t gone away. It’s not as sharp as it had been when Evan had first told me that day, but it’s still there, throbbing whenever I let my mind wander. He was a bigger piece of me than I had ever known. It feels like a piece of me had gone with him.

Then it’s all over for Evan. He texts me once and then I don’t hear from him again for a long time. I hope he’s okay, but more than that I hope the family is okay. I could’ve given them everything they needed, and it wouldn’t have been a lie. I could be with them right now, healing together. But it’s too late for that. One secret friend has already let them down, I doubt they’d let another one of us in. They don’t deserve that. I hate myself for ever going along with it to begin with. Because I’m a coward who would rather sit back and let things go to shit than actually confront my own feelings. So now we’re all hurting, and hurting alone. I have no one to blame but myself.

I’ll move on, I know I will. There’s still every chance we wouldn’t have made it past high school, no reason to even contemplate the idea of forever. There will be other guys with comforting arms and a gentle smile and maybe next time I’ll actually allow myself to feel before it’s too late. Maybe I’ll even be able to forget him one day, I’ll forget the sound of his laugh, his smirk when he used to steal my glasses just to get me to protest, the way he knew exactly where to touch to drive me absolutely insane, the way he didn’t have to use words to let me know he was there. Maybe I won’t even need to forget. Maybe I’ll be able to look back at the months we spent together and smile, thinking how good it felt to connect with someone that way. How lucky I was to have something so special.

Not yet though. It still hurts. It hurts and I don’t know how to make it stop and I miss him with everything I have.

So I finally let myself cry.

**Author's Note:**

> *hides*  
> if you made it through this, i'd love to hear what you think...i almost never write in first person so this whole thing was really just an exercise for me (while dealing with my sadness from missing the deh tour cast)


End file.
